Esoteric Tarot

This article is about the use of tarot cards for divinatory and esoteric/occult purposes. For other uses, see Tarot (disambiguation).

Esoteric Tarot is the art of reading Tarot cards, which is the practice of using cards to gain insight into the past, present or future by formulating a question, then drawing and interpreting cards. Reading Tarot cards is a type of cartomancy.

Contents

One of the earliest reference to Tarot triumphs, and probably the first reference to Tarot as the devil's picture book, is given by a Dominican preacher in a fiery sermon against the evils of the devil's instrument.[1] References to the Tarot as a social plague continue throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, but there are no indications that the cards were used for anything but games anywhere other than in Bologna.[2] As Dummett (1980: 96) notes, "...it was only in the 1780s, when the practice of fortune-telling with regular playing cards had been well established for at least two decades, that anyone began to use the Tarot pack for cartomancy."

The belief in the divinatory meaning of the cards is closely associated with a belief in their occult properties: a commonly held belief in the 18th century propagated by prominent Protestant clerics and freemasons.[2]:96 One of them was Court de Gébelin (see below).

Possibly the first of those was Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French clergyman, who wrote that after seeing a group of women playing cards he had the idea that Tarot was not merely a game of cards but was in fact of ancient Egyptian origin, of mystical cabbalistic import, and of deep divine significance. De Gébelin published a dissertation on the origins of the symbolism in the Tarot in volume VIII of work Le Monde primitif in 1781. He thought the Tarot represented ancient Egyptian Theology, including Isis, Osiris and Typhon. For example, he thought the card he knew as the Papesse and known today as the High Priestess represented Isis.[10] He also related four Tarot cards to the four Christian Cardinal virtues: Temperance, Justice, Strength and Prudence.[11] He relates The Tower to a Greek fable about avarice.[12]

Although the ancient Egyptian language had not yet been deciphered, de Gébelin asserted the name "Tarot" came from the Egyptian words Tar, "path" or "road", and the word Ro, Ros or Rog, meaning "King" or "royal", and that the Tarot literally translated to the Royal Road of Life.[13] Later Egyptologists found nothing in the Egyptian language to support de Gébelin's etymologies.[citation needed] Despite this lack of any evidence, the belief that the tarot cards are linked to the Egyptian Book of Thoth continues to the present day.

The actual source of the occult Tarot can be traced to two articles in volume eight, one written by himself, and one written by M. le C. de M.***.[14] The second has been noted to have been even more influential than de Gébelin's.[2] The author takes de Gébelin's speculations even further, agreeing with him about the mystical origins of the Tarot in ancient Egypt, but making several additional, and influential, statements that continue to influence mass understanding of the occult tarot even to this day.[citation needed] He makes the first statement proposing that the Tarot is, in fact, The Book of Thoth, that it is associated with the Romani people (and that the Romani people were roaming Egyptians), and makes the first association of Tarot with cartomancy.

created the first society for Tarot cartomancy, the Société littéraire des associés libres des interprètes du livre de Thot.

created the first corrected Tarot (supposedly fixing errors that resulted from misinterpretation and corruption through the mists of antiquity), The Grand Ettielle deck

created the first Egyptian tarot to be used exclusively for Tarot cartomancy

published, under the imprint of his society, the Dictionnaire synonimique du Livre de Thot, a book that "systematically tabulated all the possible meanings which each card could bear, when upright and reversed." (Dummett, 1980: pp. 110).

argued that the first copy of the tarot was imprinted on leaves of gold

Michael Dummett (1980) suggests that Etteilla was attempting to scoop Court de Gébelin as the author of the occult tarot.[citation needed] Etteilla in fact claimed to have been involved with Tarot longer than Court de Gébelin.[2]

Mlle Marie-Anne Adelaide Lenormand outshone even Ettiella and was the first cartomancer to people in high places, being the personal confidant of Empress Josephine, Napoleon and other notables.[2] Lenormand used both regular playing cards, in particular the Piquet pack, as well as cards derived from Etteilla's Egyptian root. She was so famous that a deck was published in her name, the Grand Jeu de Mlle Lenormand, two years after her death in 1843.

The concept of the cards as a mystical key was extended by Éliphas Lévi (1810-1875[citation needed]). Lévi (whose given name was Alphonse-Louise Constance) was educated in the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, was ordained as a deacon, but never became a priest. Dummett (1980, p. 114) notes that it is from Lévi's book Dogme et rituel that the "whole of the modern occultist movement stems." Lévi wrote that an astral light is contained within all of reality,[citation needed] and according to Dummett (1980, p. 118), he claimed to be the first to

"have discovered intact and still unknown this key of all doctrines and all philosophies of the old world... without the Tarot", he tells us, "the Magic of the ancients is a closed book...."

Lévi rejected Court de Gébelin's claims about an Egyptian origin of the deck symbols, going back instead to the Tarot de Marseille, calling it The Book of Hermes, claiming it was antique, that it existed before Moses, and that it was in fact a universal key of erudition, philosophy, and magic that could unlock Hermetic and Cabbalistic concepts. According to Lévi, "An imprisoned person with no other book than the Tarot, if he knew how to use it, could in a few years acquire universal knowledge, and would be able to speak on all subjects with unequaled learning and inexhaustible eloquence."[17]

Occultists, magicians, and magi all the way down to the 21st century have cited Lévi as a defining influence.[citation needed] This trend began immediately when Jean-Baptiste Pitois (1811), writing under the name Paul Christian, wrote L'Homme rouge (1863) and later Histoire de la magie, du monde surnaturel et de la fatalité à travers les temps et les peuples (1870). Christian repeats and extends the mythology of the tarot and changes the names for the trumps and the suits (see table below for a list of Christian's modifications to the trumps).[citation needed] Batons (wands) become Scepters, Swords become Blades, and Coins become Shekels.[18] In 1888 Ély Star published Mystères de l'horoscope which mostly repeats Christian's modifications.[19] Its primary contribution was the introduction of the terms 'Major arcana' and 'Minor arcana,' and the numbering of the Crocodile (the Fool) XXII instead of 0.[citation needed]

In 1887 the Marquis Stanislas de Guaita met the amateur artist Oswald Wirth (1860-1943) and subsequently sponsored a production of Lévi's intended deck. Guided entirely by de Guaita, Wirth designed the first neo-occultist cartomantic deck (and first cartomantic deck not derived from Ettielle's Egyptina deck). Known as the Arcanes du Tarot kabbalistique it consisted of only the twenty-two major arcana.

The following is a comparison of the order of the Major Trumps up to and including the A. E. Waite deck. This table is based on Dummett (1980) and actual inspection of the relevant decks.[original research?]

Next to the usage of tarot cards to divine for others, usually for recompense, tarot is also used widely as a device for personal advice and spiritual growth. Practitioners believe the simple-looking Tarot card layouts can greatly help you explore all the depths and nodes of your spiritual path and discover a whole new realm of possibilities for enrichment in regard to the inner self; whereas, professional tarot is often seen as charlatanism.

People who use the tarot for personal divination ask questions ranging widely from health or economical issues to what they believe would be best for them spiritually.[28] Due to this, the way practitioners use the cards are taken to respond to such personal inquiries, is subject to various personal beliefs. For example: some tarot users may believe that the cards are the ones providing the answers, while some may believe that it is a supernatural force, or perhaps energy, that is guiding the cards.

Some[who?] claim that they may also be a useful tool for psychology, often attributing this to Carl Jung. In his collected words Jung refers to tarot: "It also seems as if the set of pictures in the Tarot cards were distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation, a view that has been confirmed for me in a very enlightening lecture by Professor Bernoulli."[29]. In 1933, Jung spoke about the Tarot during a seminar on active imagination,

"The original cards of the Tarot consist of the ordinary cards, the king, the queen, the knight, the ace, etc., only the figures are somewhat different, and besides, there are twenty-one cards upon which are symbols, or pictures of symbolical situations. For example, the symbol of the sun, or the symbol of the man hung up by the feet, or the tower struck by lightning, or the wheel of fortune, and so on. Those are sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature, which mingle with the ordinary constituents of the flow of the unconscious, and therefore it is applicable for an intuitive method that has the purpose of understanding the flow of life, possibly even predicting future events, at all events lending itself to the reading of the conditions of the present moment."[30]

Quoting the skeptic James Randi, "For use as a divinatory device, the Tarot deck is dealt out in various patterns and interpreted by a gifted 'reader.' The fact that the deck is not dealt out into the same pattern fifteen minutes later is rationalized by the occultists by claiming that in that short span of time, a person's fortune can change, too. That would seem to call for rather frequent readings if the system is to be of any use whatsoever."[citation needed]

The French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle spent over two decades building her Tarot Garden in Italy. The 22 major sculptures of the garden were based on and named after the Major Arcana of the Tarot.[31]

The Fool's Errand, a 1987 computer game by Cliff Johnson, features several tarot card-themed puzzles.[33]

In The House of the Dead, a 1996 light-gun rail-shooter video game by Sega, the bosses are based on Tarot cards.

In Silent Hill 3, a 2003 survival horror video game by Team Silent, there is a puzzle that uses Tarot cards. The Order, the fictional antagonist cult in the game, has its own unique Tarot deck with 23 Major Arcana. The fictional 23rd Arcana is the XXII. Eye of Night card, which represents The Order's dark god.

^The asterix and the abbreviations are the actual way Court de Gébelin refers to the second essay. As Dummett (1980) notes, Mr Robin Briggs identifies the contributor as Louis-Raphael-Lucrece de Fayolle, Comte de Mellet. Louis was a brigadier, governor, and "unremarkable court noble."

^Court de Gébelin is the first to attempt to provide the correct order and nomenclature for the tarot trumps. See Michael Dummett. The Game of Tarot. London: Duckworth, 1980. ISBN0715631225

^Etteilla's tarot is the first cartomantic tarot, thus the broken nomenclature that bears little resemblance to that which comes before! The imagery of Ettiella's Egyptian Tarot is similar to Tarot de Marseille, but he breaks the ordering significantly putting, for example, the imagery of the Sun (traditionally triumph 19) as triumph 1. This interested in viewing the images by do so by visiting this link